Paul MacLean wrote:
It troubles me sometimes when I see kids dismissing things like Raiders of the Lost Ark as "old" and "boring", or lauding Jurassic World as "better than the original!" (as my teenage nieces did after seeing it).
The hell of it is, some critics at the time found movies like
Raiders,
Die Hard and
Top Gun to be slick, soulless and over-the-top, but now they seem as stripped-down and elegant as an Alfred Hitchcock thriller from the 40's must have seemed thirty years ago. It really
is a generational thing...I distinctly remember telling my mom that I heard that Martin Scorsese's
Cape Fear remake was "based on some old movie" back in the day, a moment that I flashed on ruefully when the
Evil Dead remake came out, and I heard an employee use the exact same line as I was leaving.
It's encouraging to see young people showing an appreciation for classics and cult flicks.
My nephew is awesome...he has a genuine appreciation for "old-school" special effects ("How did they do that?"), and doesn't let "dated" stuff like clothing and hairstyles and filmmaking techniques get in the way of a movie that tells a compelling story. Plus, it's been fun to point out the "young" versions of actors he may be familiar with (like Ian Holm in
Alien, who he recognized as Bilbo Baggins from
Lord Of The Rings). And I try to arrange "themed" double-features so the movies tie into each other in some way that they support and build on each other. He loved the 80's-tastic Netflix series
Stranger Things, so it's been fun to show him stuff from that decade that inspired it in ways big and small (still need to find something with Winona Ryder in it from that period, as I'm sure he only knows her as the mother from that show, which is kind of terrifying to consider
). And watching old favorites through a fresh pair of eyes makes them more enjoyable to
me as a pleasant side effect...it's always fun to watch a scary movie with someone who has never seen it, just to wait for the good "seat-jumper" moments (like when the Alien's hand pops out at Sigourney Weaver in the escape pod). Really looking forward to sharing
Aliens with him, just to show him where half of the cinematic DNA for James Cameron's
Avatar came from (a surly Weaver, the technology, the "military gets their asses handed to them by an indigenous species" plot, the scowling butch Latina). I've already warned him that the series took a nosedive in quality with the third and fourth movies, so we'll have to see about those.